400 Garlic Cloves Destroyed
I lost my garlic harvest this year.
Not to disease. Not to bad weather. Not to some mysterious failure of the soil.
To chickens.
My chickens, to be specific.
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I planted garlic in my food garden last October, right before our first “expected” frost. We had visited the Southwest Washington Garlic Festival with the intention of getting enough garlic to support our family until the summer harvest and hopefully have a little to sell, too.
Typically, I believe in “no-till” gardening, but our soil is so heavy with rocks that I dug out and sifted 160 square feet of soil, moving wagon-load after wagon-load of rocks out of the garden. It was beautiful.
I planted the garlic on a cool fall afternoon. The mist was rolling out of the forest. Learning lessons from times past, I immediately covered the entire bed with tight netting, and everything was perfect.
I remember when those first green shoots came up last fall and being so hopeful about how well it was doing.
Garlic takes nine months from planting to harvest, and it is a long labor of love. It’s not a plant that you measure in days to maturity. It takes optimal soil conditions and protection from predators. It takes deep mulch through the winter and soft soil in the summer.
400 garlic cloves were ready to grow.
But then, in March, I hatched out 23 Orpington chicks to raise. Wanting them to be in a safe space, I intermixed them with our duck flock, as ducks are not aggressive toward younger birds. And the best part was that the garden was already protected—against ducks and deer. It was a perfect pairing… obviously.
The good news was just that—my systems are very well perfected for deer and ducks. I have even seemed to be winning the fight against weeds and slugs, too. As it would turn out, chickens are an entirely new level of destructive.
It was a warm July afternoon when I heard my husband yell for me from the front porch:
“Hey wife! There’s chickens in your garlic bed.”
“Chickens? Like… multiple?” I replied.
“Chickens like all of them.”
And I wish that had been an understatement.
23 chickens were running in my garlic bed. And remarkably, they had the uncanny ability to get themselves into the garden bed, just not out of it.
After the chaos that was required to remove a sea of chickens from somewhere they shouldn’t be, I realized I had almost no garlic sprouts left.
Four, to be exact.
A month away from harvest, I was left standing in an empty bed, staring at a destroyed chicken-wire barrier, with so much frustration building up that I thought I would absolutely burst.
But after several years of facing failure in the eyes at the edge of my garden in one form or another, all I could do was shrug and say, “Well, I guess I can plant something else in this bed.”
So, I did.
I have found that every year in my garden, and around my farm in general, something is going to fail.
Forever.
Maybe it is something that fails insignificantly, or maybe it is the moment that brings you to your knees in the soil.
In gardening, effort doesn’t always match outcome. You can do everything “right” and still lose an entire crop. Losses like this are particularly frustrating around the farm because this wasn’t some random disaster. It was, again, an infrastructure and mismanagement mistake.
I knew my systems were temporary at best, and I should have known that they were not enough to keep the chickens out. The only thing left to do was own that mistake and learn something from it.
Chickens, as it turns out, are incredibly destructive in a garden.
Physical barriers have to meet the intensity of the animal, and not just what will work “well enough.”
Garden planning has to account for livestock behavior if they are going to share a space.
This year’s garlic planting will have a much better system for protection, and a much better chance at making it to harvest.
So, last weekend we went back to Garlic Fest. We visited Sacred Organic, the amazing garlic producer we met last year, and filled up on another load of garlic to plant.
This wasn’t something that I had planned to attend this year, but I am so grateful the opportunity was there when I needed it to be.
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I lost 400 garlic cloves this year.
It wasn't what I planned, but apparently, that's part of learning how to build a farm.